South Korea, one of the highly developed countries in the world, has a total of 140,000 doctors as well as an affordable healthcare system, however despite this, the country has one of the fewest Physicians per capita in a developed country.
As a result of this, most physicians in the country are always overworked. This however, does not affect every specialty, the major field affected the most are in the emergency specialty. Also the rural areas in the country are mostly affected from the lack of enough doctors.
According to reports, doctors in training often work shifts that last for more than 24 hours sometimes leading up to 80 hours. Also as a result of the lack of enough doctors, the working conditions of doctors in training the country is not a nice one as they have to work in uncomfortable conditions with low pay.
In a bid to find a solution to this, the government announced a plan to raise the Country’s medical school admissions quota by 65 percent, that is raising medical admission to 2,000. But in a turn of events, this did not sit down well with the doctors in the country as they argued that this is not the solution to the problem on ground.
They pointed out that the proposed increase in the number of medical students will be too much for the medical school to handle and train. Also there will be too much competition amongst the doctors when they become too much and this will lead to over treatment such as giving patients unnecessary medical treatments when not needed.
As a result of this, doctors in training across the country have been submitting their resignation letters in thousands in order to force a change in the proposed policy. It has been reported that as of Monday night, about 1630 doctor trainees out of the 13,000 available in the country, have submitted their resignation letters in solidarity with the protest. This had led to disruption in hospital operations across the country.
The government has however urged them to go on with their work as the matter will be visited and solutions wll be provided .Vice Health Minister Park Min-soo when addressing the situation said, “If you leave your patients to oppose a government policy despite knowing what your collective action would cause, that can’t be justified at all. We appeal to trainee doctors to return to patients. An act of endangering the lives of patients to express your opinions is something that you must not do.”
This is not the first time that a proposed increase in the number of doctors has caused heat between the government and doctors around the country. Some critics of the action taken by the doctors in training claim that the doctors are just afraid of competition.
